Thursday, August 30, 2012

Cover Crops and Green Manures. Who does it and why.

"Green manuring" involves the soil incorporation of any field or forage crop while green or soon after flowering, for the purpose of soil improvement. A cover crop is any crop grown to provide soil cover, regardless of whether it is later incorporated. Cover crops are grown primarily to prevent soil erosion by wind and water. Cover crops and green manures can be annual, biennial, or perennial herbaceous plants grown in a pure or mixed stand during all or part of the year. In addition to providing ground cover and, in the case of a legume, fixing nitrogen, they also help suppress weeds and reduce insect pests and diseases. When cover crops are planted to reduce nutrient leaching following a main crop, they are often termed "catch crops."
Winter Cover Crop
A winter cover crop is planted in late summer or fall to provide soil cover during the winter. Often a legume is chosen for the added benefit of nitrogen fixation. In northern states, the plant selected needs to possess enough cold tolerance to survive hard winters. Hairy Vetch, Winter Wheat and Winter Rye are among the few selections that meet this need.
Many more winter cover crops are adapted to the southern U.S. These cool-season legumes include clovers, vetches, medics, and field peas. They are sometimes planted in a mix with winter cereal grains such as oats, rye, or wheat. Winter cover crops can be established by aerial seeding into maturing cash crops in the fall, as well as by drilling or broadcasting seed immediately following harvest.
Summer Green Manure Crop
A summer green manure occupies the land for a portion of the summer growing season. These warm-season cover crops can be used to fill a niche in crop rotations, to improve the conditions of poor soils, or to prepare land for a perennial crop. Legumes such as cow peas, soybeans, annual sweet clover, sesbania, guar, crotalaria, or velvet beans may be grown as summer green manure crops to add nitrogen along with organic matter. Non-legumes such as sorghum-sudangrass, millet, forage sorghum, or buckwheat are grown to provide biomass, smother weeds, and improve soil tilth.
Living Mulch
A living mulch is a cover crop that is interplanted with an annual or perennial cash crop. Living mulches suppress weeds, reduce soil erosion, enhance soil fertility, and improve water infiltration. Examples of living mulches in annual cropping systems include overseeding hairy vetch into corn at the last cultivation, no-till planting of vegetables into subclover, sweet clover drilled into small grains, and annual ryegrass broadcast into vegetables. Living mulches in perennial cropping systems are simply the grasses or legumes planted in the alleyways between rows in orchards, vineyards, Christmas trees, berries, windbreaks, and field nursery trees to control erosion and provide traction.
Catch Crop
A catch crop is a cover crop established after harvesting the main crop and is used primarily to reduce nutrient leaching from the soil profile. For example, planting cereal rye following corn harvest helps to scavenge residual nitrogen, thus reducing the possibility of groundwater contamination. In this instance, the rye catch crop also functions as a winter cover crop. Short-term cover crops that fill a niche within a crop rotation are also commonly known as catch crops.